Ghana’s rice producers are accusing the National Food Buffer Stock Company (NAFCO) of repeatedly ignoring a presidential directive to prioritise the purchase of locally grown rice, as more than one million metric tonnes of unsold paddy, valued at GH¢5 billion, piles up across the country.
The Association of Ghana Rice Producers and Processors raised the alarm at a World Bank Civil Society Organisation engagement on food security, where an executive member, Dr. Terence Adda-Balinia, said the failure of state procurement systems to act has pushed major rice millers to suspend operations.
“Over one million farmers are overwhelmed by huge losses, with the situation posing high threats to sustainability of the local rice industry,” Dr. Adda-Balinia said. “This is also creating a high tendency of unemployment crisis in the sector.”
The accusation adds to a growing body of concern about NAFCO’s effectiveness. A February 2026 report by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) found that a GH¢200 million procurement budget approved by parliament for NAFCO to address the surplus had not been released by the Ministry of Finance, leaving farmers with no institutional buyer of last resort. The AGRA report also warned that prolonged storage is degrading rice quality, increasing breakage during milling and reducing marketability and value.
The crisis has multiple drivers. Cheap smuggled rice is flooding the domestic market, undermining farmgate prices at a time when production costs remain high. Ghana imports roughly 60 percent of its rice needs and spends more than US$500 million annually on those imports. Producers acknowledge that imported rice is often cheaper, better packaged and more visually appealing, making direct competition difficult without policy support.
The AGRA report cautioned that farmers are likely to reduce production during the next growing season, increasing the risk of food insecurity, a warning that turns the current surplus into a potential precursor to shortage if the underlying market failure is not resolved.
What Producers Are Demanding
The association has presented government with a series of specific interventions. At the top of the list is a temporary six-month moratorium on rice imports to allow existing domestic stocks to clear. Alongside that, producers want a transparent import quota system that limits imports to genuine supply gaps rather than volumes that compete directly with local output.
They are calling on the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and security agencies to intensify enforcement against cross-border smuggling, which they say continues to distort pricing across the market. They also want a binding directive requiring all public institutions, including those under the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), schools, hospitals and prisons, to source rice exclusively from domestic producers.
On structural support, the association is pushing for the introduction of annual minimum farmgate prices and the creation of a dedicated financing facility providing low-interest credit to rice millers, particularly during harvest periods when cash flow pressure is greatest.
The demands reflect a sector that says it has delivered on production but is being failed at the market end. As Dr. Adda-Balinia put it, the industry has already done “the hard work” to boost output and now requires targeted policy intervention to make that investment worthwhile.
Whether government moves decisively will determine not only the fortunes of the current harvest but whether farmers plant again next season at all.
